Consumed

by J. R. Ward

And then he saw the fight on the lawn behind the fire. Two people were rolling around on the ground. With something circling them.

  Was the guy killing Deandra?

  “Moose, stop! We weren’t together, she’s lying—”

  Off at the tree line, parked at the head of a dirt lane about one hundred yards away, was Anne’s Subaru.

  What the hell?

  Danny sidestepped the heat and the crackling flames that were coming out the back of the trailer. And as the smoke was blown in another direction, he got a clear view of something that made no sense: It was Anne and Moose who were fighting, and Soot was on the periphery, barking, snarling, limping badly like he’d been hurt.

  Slow motion.

  Everything went into slow motion: Moose flipping Anne on her back, Soot snapping at his hand as he pointed a gun in her face.

  The most primitive and protective part of Danny’s mind put the pieces together faster than his higher reasoning could organize proper thought. With every ounce of power he had, he surged forward at a dead run, and on his way, he picked up the first weapon he came to.

  A long-handled axe that was leaning against the garage.

  Just as Moose was about to pull the trigger, Danny skidded into place, swung the blade, and caught the would-be killer in the back of the head.

  Moose stiffened in a full-body seizure, and Anne reacted with split-second reflexes. Even though she was bleeding from the nose, she twisted and caught the nine-millimeter, snatching it out of the man’s control as he fell forward onto the ground.

  Then she shoved herself free, scrambling out from under the now-limp deadweight that lay motionless, like a corpse.

  Danny went so numb that he lost his bearings and released his hold on the handle, collapsing onto the ground . . . all the time staring at the axe as it held its own against gravity, sure as if he’d buried the blade in nothing but an oak stump.

  “Soot!”

  Shaking himself, he glanced at Anne. She was trembling as she kept the gun pointed at Moose and pulled her dog in against her, the animal licking at her, nuzzling, whimpering.

  When she finally looked at Danny, he put his palms up into the air like she might shoot him, too.

  Silence came over the scene and his brain tried to connect with a reality he didn’t understand. Couldn’t possibly grasp.

  Anne seemed to be in a similar state of shock.

  Why had his old roommate been trying to kill her?

  “Are you okay?” he said roughly.

  Her eyes, wide and glassy, locked on his face. “Danny . . . it was him. It was Moose. He lit the fires at those warehouses . . . and he was going to kill me.”

  Danny slowly lowered his hands. What the hell had Moose fallen into?

  “He did it for the money,” Anne mumbled. “That’s where all the money came from, for the wedding, this house, that Shelby in the garage. He was disappearing evidence in those fires, but I wasn’t able to connect him with Ripkin. I still don’t know how Ripkin is involved.”

  Danny rubbed his face. “All I care about right now is that you’re okay.”

  He leaned forward and took her hand. When she didn’t pull away, he brought her up against him and squeezed his eyes shut briefly. Holding her tight, he looked over her shoulder at the body of his old friend.

  The sadness was so deep he felt certain his heart was going to stop. He didn’t know how a man he had lived with for years had turned so bad, but the one thing he was sure about was that Anne was alive.

  Nothing else, even Moose, mattered more than that.

  Easing back, he brushed some of the grass from her hair. “I need you to know I wasn’t with Deandra the night before the wedding. Put a bullet in me now and send me to my twin brother, I will swear to that on my soul. She lied to Moose to make him mad, and she did it in front of the whole stationhouse, but it wasn’t true. I wouldn’t have done that to Moose. And I wouldn’t have done that to you.”

  He let Anne stare into his eyes for as long as she needed to, all the while praying that the truth was something she could recognize in him.

  After what felt like a lifetime, she whispered, “You saved my life again, Dannyboy.”

  “I will always be there for you.” As her hand lifted up to touch his face, he captured it and pressed a kiss to her palm. “Always.”

  chapter

  53

  Anne sat on the back of the ambulance and held an ice pack to her nose. The bleeding had stopped, but she was worried it was broken. Every time she poked it, the middle made a crunching sound and that was not good news.

  “—so that was when you decided to come out here and confront him?” the detective said to her.

  Two more police vehicles came up to the scene and joined the four that were already parked in a circle around the ranch. The uniforms who got out were folks she remembered from her nights at Timeout, and absurdly she wanted to wave and say hello to them, like she was the hostess of this shit party.

  “Anne?”

  “Sorry.” She refocused on the woman. “Yeah, I decided to come talk to him. It seemed like everything was adding up, but I needed to be sure. When I got here, I opened the back of the trailer”—edited to remove mention of her shooting the lock off—“and I saw the office equipment in there.”

  “What kind of office equipment?”

  “Laptops. Computers. Phones. I’m guessing that Ripkin Development was either hiding things they wanted to destroy in Ollie Popper’s extensive collection, or they have far more extensive dealings in the black market than law enforcement can even begin to contemplate.”

  “Okay, so then what happened?”

  Her mouth started to move again, words leaving in a stream, and she guessed she was making sense. The detective was nodding and making notes.

  But Anne had stopped listening to herself.

  Danny came walking around the corner of the house, two uniforms with him, the three men talking intently. When he saw that she was looking at him, he stopped, like he wasn’t sure whether he was welcome or not.

  Soot, who had refused to leave her side, let out a chuff in greeting.

  “That’s all for right now,” the detective said. “We’ll let you get treated, but you’ll have to make a formal statement.”

  “Anytime you want me at the station, I’ll come down.”

  “Thanks, Inspector Ashburn. We appreciate your cooperation.”

  As she was left alone, Danny said something to the pair of cops and came over. “Hey. Nice nose job.”

  She took the ice pack off. “Do you think it’s too much? I was just looking to get the bridge narrowed and the tip turned up a little.”

  “I think we need to wait until the swelling goes down.”

  “Yeah. Plastic surgery is like that.”

  “Can I say hi to your dog?”

  Like they were strangers. “Of course. He loves you.”

  Danny got down on his haunches, that knee of his popping. As he put his face into Soot’s, he said, “You okay there, boy? You were limping.”

  “I think Moose kicked him. But at least neither of us got shot.”

  As she regarded Danny, she measured every inch of him, from the way the sunlight flashed in his jet black hair, to those stupidly huge shoulders of his, to his hands. Those amazing, strong, blue-collar hands.

  That had saved her life twice.

  Because the truth was, she had been losing physical strength fast. And if Moose had pulled that trigger, he would have put a bullet in her head.

  Tears flooded her eyes, so she closed them.

  “Anne,” Danny said in a broken voice.

  There was a shuffle, and then he was sitting next to her on the lip of the ambulance. “Give us a minute,” she heard him say to someone.

  She sniffled herself back into order—or tried to. Jesus, her nose hurt.

  “So in the rules of evidence,” she said roughly, “the court allows deathbed confessions even if they’re hearsay outside of that extenuating
circumstance. You know, because people don’t lie when they’re just about to die.”

  “No, they don’t.”

  “And following that theory, I’m thinking it’s probably the same for people right after they kill their best friend.” She closed her eyes. “Oh, God, did this just happen. I mean, really?”

  A warm, calloused hand took hers. “Yes. To both, I mean.”

  “What?” Her head just couldn’t seem to process anything. “I’m not thinking straight.”

  “I didn’t lie, about Deandra.” As Anne looked at him, he stared right back at her. “You don’t have to be with me if you don’t want to, but I need you to know the truth. I didn’t lie about her. The night of the rehearsal dinner, it’s true that she came on to me back at my apartment, but I turned her down. Moose might have seen her dress on the floor, but what he didn’t catch was me frog-marching her out of the place and locking things up so she couldn’t get back in. She wasn’t for me. She never was. And I was never with her after they were married either.”

  When Anne took a deep breath, her ribs hurt and she grimaced. Which made her nose hurt more. But none of that mattered.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m so sorry. I just . . . I believed what was in front of me.”

  She fell into confirming her hypothesis, which had been that Danny was too good to be true.

  “It’s okay.” He looked down at the ground. “It is what it is—”

  “I love you.”

  His head turned back to her so fast, she heard his neck crack.

  “Just figured I should tell you.” Anne shrugged. “It’s too little, too late, but—”

  The kiss came out of nowhere, his mouth fusing with hers, and she was too shell-shocked to respond. At first. She got with the program quick, though.

  When they finally parted, she couldn’t get enough of staring into those blue eyes. “I’m sorry about Moose, too. I can’t imagine what you’re feeling right now.”

  He nodded as he brushed her hair back. “None of it seems real at all. Except for one thing.”

  “What’s that?”

  His face settled into hard lines. “If anyone tries to hurt you, I will come for them. And I will take care of the situation in any way I have to.”

  Anne’s first instinct was to tell him she didn’t need the help, but that was reflex, not reality. She wanted him in her life in all the ways that counted, and the knight-in-shining-armor stuff was part of that mix.

  Provided he understood that she would do the same for him.

  Reaching up, she smoothed his furrowed brows. “Guess what?”

  “What?”

  “Two can play at that game.” She smiled a little. “I’ve got your back when you need it, too. I’m your partner, not a princess in a tower.”

  “And that, my fair lady, is why I love you.”

  He kissed her again, and she thought about all the emotions in the air between them: The hope, sadness, gratitude, anger, and confusion . . . even the fading terror. She had been through enough bad accident scenes and fires to know there would be a tail on all this. They would get through it together, though. What choice was there. You were either a survivor or casualty.

  And they were survivors.

  “Anne.”

  At the sound of her brother saying her name, they pulled apart. Tom was standing by the back of the ambulance, tall as always, autocratic as ever—with eyes that were tearing up.

  Struck by even more emotion, Anne shifted off the steel bumper and went to him. There was an awkward moment, as they had never been huggers—

  Her brother’s heavy arms came around her and drew her against his big chest. Closing her eyes, she took a deep breath.

  For a moment, the past and the present blended together, and she felt an echo of the way it had been for her as a child with her father, sheltered in the lee of something greater and stronger than herself. But then all that had gone away, the hero image replaced by a human with devastating flaws.

  Which was why people needed to stand on their own two feet.

  Pulling back, she looked up. The vulnerability in her brother’s face was a shock. He’d never looked to her for grounding or support. He never looked to anyone for that.

  “It’s okay,” she told him. “It’s all okay. I promise.”

  He shuddered and dropped his head. “I can’t lose you, Sister.”

  “You haven’t. You won’t.” She smiled. “I’m an Ashburn.”

  Her brother’s stare returned to her and he nodded gravely. “That you are. Through and through.”

  As they hugged again, Anne was aware of an uncoiling deep inside of her, that anger that had defined her for so long shattering like a mirror and dissipating. Growing up, all she had ever wanted was her father’s respect.

  It turned out that destiny gave her something even better, more worthwhile.

  She had earned her big brother’s.

  In the periphery, Anne was aware of Danny sitting back and watching the pair of them, the smile on his face wide and approving.

  When Tom reached out a palm toward him, Danny shook what was offered, a vow given and accepted on both sides: In the midst of chaos and death, a new family had been forged. One that was chosen as opposed to an accident of biology—and for that reason, more abiding and enduring.

  chapter

  54

  One week later, Anne left her office on a long lunch break. Don was going to watch Soot, who had become the investigation team’s mascot, and she had a feeling “watch” meant her boss was going to take the dog down the street to the deli and the two of them were going to share a turkey, cheese, and mayo foot-long and two bags of potato chips.

  No wonder Soot also thought that man was the World’s Greatest Boss.

  The strip mall that was her destination was nothing she had been to before, although she had driven by it plenty of times, and she found a parking space easily enough. She was early and the noontime sun was still fairly warm, so she took a leisurely stroll past the stores.

  The fallout around Moose’s death was sad. His body was being buried, but not with departmental honors. How could it be? He had endangered the lives of his fellow firefighters. Committed arson. Tried to kill her.

  The investigation into his crimes had expanded to include the FBI, given the interstate nature of Ollie Popper’s black-market activity. An LG burner phone had been found inside Moose’s house, and the calls to her cell had been in its outgoing log. An anonymous texting app, TextPort, was the only thing loaded onto it.

  The money trail was cold. There had been just over five thousand dollars in cash in Moose’s bedroom, but no clues so far on where it had come from. And as for Ripkin? That tie had not been exposed, but she still believed it was there. Moose’s spending had far exceeded the random thousand here or there that someone like Ollie could pay somebody.

  And that was why she truly believed it hadn’t just been stolen office equipment in those fires. Ripkin was hiding secrets, although what kind, she didn’t know and officially couldn’t find out: She had filed her report on the most recent warehouse fire, and her amendments to the other five, but unless she was called into the Moose investigation, her role for her department was done.

  Which was frustrating.

  On top of that, she was worried about Danny. It was obvious that he was sad deep inside and keeping things to himself, and that concerned her. It might be the way things always had been, but that stoic, power-through mentality needed to change. It just wasn’t healthy.

  Everything else was great between them, though. He had moved into her house by attrition, every night heading over with another bunch of clothes, not that he had much. He’d also brought his fancy TV with him, and she had to admit it was a helluva improvement over her piece of crap.

  He was letting that apartment go. An era over. The four men who had started out as fraternity brothers graduating on to adulthood.

  Or the grave, in Moose’s case.

  Stopping
in front of a dress shop, she tilted her head at what was in the window. Deandra had left town, quitting her job, packing up her stuff, and going off to God only knew where. She wasn’t free, though. Not by a long shot. The authorities had questioned her and she was still on their list as a person of interest. It was pretty clear the woman might have had the motive, but there was no concrete evidence that she’d done anything criminal herself.

  The investigation was ongoing, however.

  “Anne!”

  She turned and started to smile. “Hi, Mom. Thanks for coming.”

  As she met her mother halfway down the strip mall, she decided her brother was right. Their mom seemed much happier and lighter, in the last week.

  Healing was good for people, wasn’t it.

  “You are not going to believe it,” Nancy Janice announced, “but I sold two of my oil paintings at a gallery this morning! I can’t stand it! Who would ever have thought anybody would want something I did?”

  Anne hugged her mother and was surprised by how easy it was. “I’m proud of you.”

  “Me, too.” Nancy Janice took Anne’s hand. “Now, let’s focus on you.”

  “Oh, God, this is a dumb idea.”

  “No, it is not. And I’ll be with you the whole time. Come on, let’s do this.”

  As they walked toward the hair salon together, Anne glanced over her shoulder. “And after we’re done, I want to go to this other shop for a second. There’s something I want your opinion on.”

  * * *

  Danny could not frickin’ sit down. On that note, he wished the waiting room was twelve times the size it was.

  Back and forth. Back and forth. Back and—

  The door opened and Dr. McAuliffe smiled at him. “Well, hello.”

  “Hi, Doc.” He shoved his hands into the pockets of his jeans. “How’re ya?”

  “Good, very good. Come on back.”

  As she held the way open for him, he hesitated. But then he forced his feet to get moving.

  “Thanks, Doc,” he muttered as he went inside.

  “Sit wherever you like. You remember the rules. There really aren’t any.”